[guelo]

Wow, that number almost doesn't seem believable. A million people must be a good chunk of all programmers in the world. This Wikipedia article[1] says there are 612,000 programmers in the US and 522,000 in India. Admittedly old incomplete data but it's easy to see how a million people might be 10-20% of all programmers worldwide. In corporate drone offices I've been in my guess is maybe 10% of programmers have even heard of git.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Software_engineering_demographi...

[shabble]

Do you need an account to be able to report issues or watch projects? Interested bystanders and responsible bug-reporting OSS citizens may account for some of that.

I wonder how many of those accounts have active repos of their own?

[Zev]

I would wonder how many of those accounts have pushed to a repo recently, not just their own (in cases where people work for a company/on a project that has a GitHub organization).

[andrewl-hn]

Yep, that's a valid point. I got my account for more than a year but I use it to report issues and for Gists only.

[ddbeck]

I imagine there's also a small, but non-trivial number of people on GitHub who wouldn't be readily identified as programmers. For example, I'm acquainted with a civil engineer that's on GitHub so he can contribute to software used with his astronomy hobby.

[dasil003]

also designers. That might be the biggest demographic of "non-programmers" even though the designers on github veer technical.

[mrpollo]

I know Project and Account managers that have github accounts, you are probably missing those or similar users in nature

[bdunn]

Many of our non-technical clients have Github accounts and are collaborators on our projects - we treat the commit log as our way of reporting status updates.

[swlkr]

I was wondering this same thing! I wonder if someone can provide more recent data on how many programmers there are worldwide.